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Cloud computing provides resources as services in pay-as-you-go mode to customers by using virtualization technology. As virtual machine (VM) is hosted on physical server, great energy is consumed by maintaining the servers in data center. More physical servers means more energy consumption and more money cost. Therefore, the VM placement (VMP) problem is significant in cloud computing. This paper proposes an approach based on ant colony optimization (ACO) to solve the VMP problem, named as ACO-VMP, so as to effectively use the physical resources and to reduce the number of running physical servers. The number of physical servers is the same as the number of the VMs at the beginning. Then the ACO approach tries to reduce the physical server one by one. We evaluate the performance of the proposed ACO-VMP approach in solving VMP with the number of VMs being up to 600. Experimental results compared with the ones obtained by the first-fit decreasing (FFD) algorithm show that ACO-VMP can solve VMP more efficiently to reduce the number of physical servers significantly, especially when the number of VMs is large.
Liu et al. (2014) studied this question.